Writer Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, whom I’ve been fortunate to know for several years through the writing group Codex, has fired up an ambitious project to create a site offering a variety of important writing and publishing information, filling in the gap that’s left by Duotrope becoming an expensive, paid service and adding on a number of coveted writerly items. If you’re interested in checking the project out, hop over to Indiegogo and see where it stands: http://www.indiegogo.com/submitomancy .

My 16-year-old son Ethan recently wrote his first short story intended for publication, and my niece, a high school senior, is visiting colleges like Middlebury, Williams, Wesleyan, and Bennington looking for a school that can help her develop a career as a writer. Just in case I wasn’t already thinking enough about the topic, I also recently received this question through my Web site:

Could you offer some advice for my 17-year-old daughter? She is about to apply to a Canadian college for English, and she aspires to become a novelist. Her strengths are writing, philosophy, drawing, photography. She wants to be her own boss, and not necessarily take courses that most people do if they want to become a writer–any advice?

In terms of my qualifications for answering this question, I should make sure you know I don’t make a full-time living at writing. At the same time I’ve won a major international writing award, sold a book and multiple short stories, gathered a large daily readership for my Web site, and appeared in magazines that are circulated around the world. What may be even more useful in answering this question is that I run an online writer’s group, Codex, and have had the opportunity to talk to literally hundreds of skillful writers, from people still trying to make their first pro sale to ones who make a comfortable living from their fiction, about their approach to building a writing career and their experiences trying to do that.

Based on that, here are the 11 most important things I can tell an aspiring fiction writer.

1. Making a living writing fiction is a long shot, like making a living acting or painting. If you try to do it, try because you love writing and will write no matter what. If you don’t love it, spare yourself the heartache and aim for a field that can actually pay the rent. This article from a few years back explains some of the sad realities of trying to make a living in writing.
2. As the article I just mentioned suggests, you don’t have to go to college to become a good writer, but for some people–especially people who haven’t had a college education in another field–it can be an important step. With that said, facing actual troubles in the real world and learning something from the process is usually the strongest basis for writing that connects with readers.
3. Write only what fascinates you and draws your passionate interest. Don’t waste effort trying to write something solely because it seems more marketable, more respectable, more lucrative, more popular, or more seemly. Writing what you love will help inspire you, make it easier to push forward through difficulties, and will shine through in both your work and your promotion.
4. You can make a living at novels, feature-length screenplays, and other long-form work, but consider writing many short works first to hone your craft, to boost your spirits with sales, and to gain some credentials.
5. Never get angry at feedback or critique. Try to learn from it, and use it if it strikes a chord with you, but make a practice of understanding that your work is not the same as your identity and that nothing you can write will suit everyone. Also, learn to distinguish between “I don’t like it now, but I would if you made certain improvements” and “I don’t like it because I’m not the right audience for your work.”
6. Becoming a better writer stems from practice and feedback. Write a lot and get people to read your work by joining critique groups, submitting to publications, blogging fiction, or any other means that gets you information about how people experience your work. A useful article on this topic is “Critique, Mentors, Practice, and a Million Words of Garbage.”
7. Read a lot of books about writing, but watch out for advice that you have to do things a certain way. Many very successful writers seem to believe that their way of writing, editing, planning, outlining, or of structuring a career is the only one that works, and this is rarely true. They will promote their ways of doing things because those are the only means they’ve experienced. Talking to or reading about more writers will clarify that there is not just one way to succeed.
8. The publishing world is in the midst of a huge upheaval, and the way to build a writing career has changed even in the last few years, closing some doors and opening others. Self-publishing and eBooks are now an essential part of the process, whereas they used to not matter. Pay attention to the changes in publishing, but don’t let them throw you. People will always be willing to pay for good stories, so there will always be writing careers of some kind, but don’t get too attached to your career unfolding–or continuing–in any particular way.
9. The most important basis for a writing career is strong, professional, affecting, engaging writing. If you always strive to make your writing better, you will be investing in your career. However …
10. Regardless of how good your writing is, you will almost certainly have to market it to someone, whether that’s an agent, an editor, a producer, the readers themselves, or some combination. Learn how to present yourself and your work professionally, how to summarize your writing projects effectively, and how to connect with new people who might just love your books.
11. Guard your integrity: it’s extremely valuable and very difficult to regain if lost. Misusing online review venues, misrepresenting your publishing history, or mistreating your colleagues, for instance, will all ultimately tend to cost you more than you’ll get in short-term benefits.

Photo by Christopher S. Penn

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

Ever have one of those dreams where you’re naked in public? Writing fiction is a bit like having that kind of dream, and some writing is embarrassing because it lays us bare.

I’m talking about the kind of writing where you say something to the entire world that you would prefer not to mention to anyone, just because you want to tell a meaningful story. Or you do something in the story that has very little to do with you personally, that means a lot in the piece you’re writing, but that embarrasses you because you don’t want anyone to think it’s autobiographical.

No, no — that’s not about me!
Let’s dwell on that second situation for a moment, being worried that people will think you’re writing about yourself when you aren’t. This can come up with truly horrible characters—the child molester/serial killer in The Lovely Bones comes to mind—with sexual behavior or fetishes, with gender identity and sexual preference … Looking at my own work, for instance, I find a modest number of stories about lesbians but very few about gay men (though I’ve written both). Like a straight actor who’s offered a gay part in a production, straight writers may not want to be assumed to be gay by the general public. Yet there are times when a gay man would be the best choice in a story, or where a BDSM fetishist (if we’re talking about sexual behaviors) or a male-to-female transsexual (if we’re talking about gender identity) would probably be the ideal thing. Yet for me, my own concerns about what people assume get in the way, even though I’m unconflictedly in support of the LGBTQ community and wish that more fiction were written about non-straight people.

My writing might also be stronger if I were more willing to write characters who are racist or sexist or prejudiced in some other way I find repugnant: certainly you can’t write The Lovely Bones or To Kill a Mockingbird or The Silence of the Lambs without sharing some contemptible characters with the world. Even Holden Caulfield’s bouts of ignorance and trouble with depression in The Catcher in the Rye require that kind of commitment from the writer.

So, note to self: man up and stop worrying about what people will think.

My hope is that most intelligent people understand that there’s a difference between the author and the characters — but even if that’s not true, I care less about what people think than about what my writing does to them. If you haven’t written about people you’d cringe to have identified with you, maybe it’s time to try — just a rough draft of a short story, filled with characters who really interest you but who might embarrass you. The story can be deleted or shredded afterward if necessary — although often it seems to be that stepping up to a fear drains it of its power, so perhaps you’ll surprise yourself.

Pay no attention to the man behind that story!
The other kind of embarrassment, being embarrassed by what you reveal, may be a surprisingly rich source of material if you haven’t mined it before (or haven’t mined it lately). After all, the things we like least about ourselves are some of the most cathartic things to read–and possibly write–about. What would Hamlet be without Hamlet’s suicidal rants, his anger at his mother, and the horribly stupid mistake of killing his would-be girlfriend’s father through a curtain? I don’t know for certain how closely Shakespeare himself identified with these kinds of elements, but he clearly understood what it was like to be jealous, what it was like to be depressed, and what it was like to make a stupid mistake that ruins your life.

This kind of embarrassment can also be therapeutic. There are few things in this world more comforting than facing a fear and finding out you can best it–that there’s no need to avoid it any more, if there ever was.

Must … maintain … illusion … of competence …
While I’m on the subject of fear of embarrassment, let me touch on one last kind: fear of being seen as incompetent. As writers, we’re likely familiar with the kinds of stories and voices people generally accept in modern fiction, and it’s pretty normal for us to produce something more or less in the same vein. Trying things that are strange and bizarre, that we have no way of knowing whether people will like, is much harder. Yet ground-breaking work often comes from writing things that would be more than a bit embarrassing if they failed. Alice in Wonderland, if it weren’t full of genius, would be creepy beyond belief. If Watership Down had failed, Richard Adams probably would not want his eventual epitaph to be “He wrote about bunny rabbits.” Kurt Vonnegut broke writing rules left and right, though fortunately he was brilliant at it, since his stories would be laughably bad if they weren’t supported by skillful writing.

So there lies more encouragement to stretch and embarrass ourselves, because groundbreaking fiction is often the kind that stands out in a potentially humiliating way. What’s the worst that can happen? We’ll be laughed out of our writers’ groups? Laughed out of polite reading society? Enh, I’ve been laughed out of places before. It’s no fun, but it’s rarely fatal.

So let’s get embarrassed! Um … you first.

Photo by Shucker

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

In Star Wars: Episode I, Qui-Gon Jinn quips “There’s always a bigger fish.” Admittedly he’s wrong, because since there aren’t an infinite number of fish in the universe, so one fish or group of fish has to be the biggest. And I’m probably wrong too when I say “there’s always another way to write it”–but as with the fish thing, it appears that it’s a rule that’s always accurate.

What this means for writers is that there are hidden solutions to almost any writing problem.

Much, Much More Flexible Than We Thought
There’s a book called Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by a brilliant but strange guy named Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter wrote this entire 832-page tome about the problems of translating a single pretty-good-but-not-amazing 16th century French poem. The thing is, like many decent poems, “A une Da-moyselle malade” (“To a Sick Young Lady”) has a very specific meter, rhyming scheme, interplay of meanings, etc. Since English, while closely related, is definitely not French, it’s impossible to accomplish everything the original poem accomplishes in an English translation … or is it? What Hofstadter goes on to show, with examples from a wide variety of translations by friends and colleagues, is that if you try hard enough, you can come up with a way to manage almost anything you want with language. This is especially true in English, with its enormous vocabulary.

I don’t know if this is rocking your world the way it did mine: maybe the full power of this fact doesn’t hit without 1) reading through the book, 2) becoming convinced that there’s something that simply can’t be accomplished in English, and then 3) reading an example that does the impossible thing and three other things at once. The moment where Hofstadter really got his point across to me wasn’t in the translations, though: it was when, about 200 pages in, he started talking about using nonsexist language while also steering clear of the awkward but more respectful “he or she” (or “she or he,” as I tend to write it). If you’ve ever tried to write nonfiction with these restrictions, you may have a reaction something like mine: that’s a great idea, but it’s next to impossible.

Then Hofstadter points out that he has written the entire book in non-sexist language without ever using “he or she”–and I had never even noticed! As difficult as that job sometimes seems, Hofstadter can do it so comfortably that it’s completely invisible.

I can’t change that: I need it
I was corresponding with a writer friend recently about a very engaging book he’s writing, and we were talking about a lump of text early on, an important quotation. I suggested that the text didn’t work well as is, and he agreed, but said “I will have to split it up, but I can’t really alter it … I need it for the end.”

Now, “need” is a red flag word for me in everyday life, writing aside, because it often indicates a “broken idea” or “cognitive distortion”, which is to say the kind of thinking that generally doesn’t get us anywhere and makes us miserable. In writing, there’s a similar issue: we may get it in our heads that something has to be a particular way without ever questioning that assumption. In my friend’s case, it’s entirely possible that it’s best for that chunk of text to remain exactly as it is, but does it need to? Our options as writers are practically infinite–is it possible there’s really no alternative whatsoever that still works with the entire story if he were to change that text?

This is the kind of thing that we can tend to get caught up in when we’re writing: “I know that part is kind of boring, but Ihave to get that information in so that people will understand the rest of the story” or “It would be great if character x had a change of heart here, but she isn’t like that,” or even simply “I wish I could try that, but that’s not how the story’s supposed to go.”

Alexander the Great and Indiana Jones
It’s easy to make ourselves think that some piece of our book–a character, an event, the way events are presented, a description, dialog, whatever–has to be the way that it is, but the fact of the matter is that virtually anything could be changed in a way that doesn’t harm or even improves the story. This doesn’t mean that we have to rethink everything we come up with, of course, but it does mean that any time we find ourselves obstructed by a decision we’ve made or a chunk of writing we’ve done, it helps to step away from that and think for a minute about the other ways we could tackle the same thing. If it doesn’t seem possible, it’s often worth actually giving an alternative a try to see if it somehow works out anyway. There is virtually always a different word, a different character twist, a different event that can do what we want it to do if we work hard enough to find it. And practicing this is practice writing differently, which gives us flexibility and fluidity and options.

These kinds of possibilities are a challenge to us to write better, to do more things at once in our writing. Frankly, my feeling is that we need all the advantages we can get. As the writing world gets harder and harder to predict from a business perspective, the only advantage we can really control much is how good we’re getting at writing itself. Being able to cut the Gordian knot (Alexander the Great) or shoot the scary-looking guy with the sword (Indiana Jones) is a good skill to have, and the only time it’s not available to us is when we’re facing that one, biggest fish–at which point, honestly, translating French poetry wouldn’t have saved us anyway.

This was supposed to be a sword-vs.-whip fight, but Indiana Jones makes my point for me

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

My life is fairly crammed, and writing time is hard to come by. Today I got one of those precious blocks of time in which I could write for several hours almost without interruption, yet as I fired up the computer, I felt not excited about the prospect, but worried and on edge.  I also felt a little unsure: I had several projects I could be working on and was waffling on which one to choose.

Looking before leaping
I could have just plunged in and begun working on whatever seemed easiest, most obvious, or most attractive, and if I got deeply enough into the writing that I achieved flow, that might have gone well. On the other hand, I might have made a bad choice out of inattention, and it’s possible that even if I’d made a good random choice, my concern that I might be working on the wrong thing or my general unexplored discomfort might have seriously interfered with my ability to focus. Under those conditions, I might be especially unlikely to enjoy the work, which is a problem, because while common sense suggests that it doesn’t matter to productivity whether you enjoy the writing or not as you do it, in truth not enjoying what we’re doing tends to make us quit sooner, latch onto distractions more easily, feel less positive about what we’re achieving, and avoid coming back to do more. Liking the process of writing is a good way to write more and to be more invested in our work.

Schema journaling
So instead of starting by writing, I started by writing down my thoughts about writing. One of my current projects is a layperson’s book on mental schemas. Mental schemas (the habitual patterns called “early maladaptive schemas,” if we want to be more technical) are persistent ways of thinking that tend to interfere with living a happy and productive life, explored in detail in a branch of psychology called Schema Therapy. To provide a framework for making use of these ideas in my book, I’ve been experimenting with something I call a Schema Journal, where daily entries are an opportunity to find focus, work through confusing situations, reflect on progress and obstacles, and find answers to difficult questions. This same approach can be used without keeping a journal to sort out any situation that seems to be interfering with writing, whether it’s intellectual (like choosing which of two projects to pursue), emotional (like feeling worried that a project isn’t going well), or organizational (like having trouble finding time to write).

Schema journaling tools
Just writing freely about problems is a good approach, but it can be especially effective to write to a specific purpose. Here are some of the available tools or purposes writing about writing can have:

• Feedback loop: Reflection on how behaviors and choices are affecting a situation so far, identifying improvements, and coming up with specific plans to use those improvements at the next opportunity.
• Exploration: Thinking in detail about an opportunity or problem to come up with more specific questions or goals.
• Decision: Making a choice. This is the kind of entry I used today, starting with the question “Which of my writing projects should I work on at the moment?” This came after realizing that what was holding me back from feeling enthusiastic about writing was that I was conflicted about which project to work on. If I hadn’t been sure what the problem was, an “Exploration” entry would have been the thing to do first. That would have led me to the question I could use for my Decision entry.
• Assignment: Choosing a task that is usually avoided and setting a specific time frame for getting it done. This shouldn’t be a big project, but rather a specific thing you can accomplish, preferably in one attempt. Ideally this is something you can repeat, for instance “Choose a short story that needs a small amount of editing, edit it, and send it out.” The writing to do about the task is whatever is needed to create enthusiasm and get focused.
• Envision: Visualize a future situation that helps motivate you. The situation should be plausible, but doesn’t have to be something that’s immediately realistic. Getting used to the idea that things could go well and allowing ourselves to feel some of the emotions we experience when things do go well can help create a more positive and focused mood for writing.

There are additional kinds of entries in an actual Schema Journal that are more involved and have longer-term intentions, but the five specific tools above offer ways to get past the emotions, complications, and mental obstacles that prevent writing from getting done, or sometimes that simply get in the way of enjoying the process.

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

Writing professionally, or even just aspiring to write professionally, requires a weird combination of hubris and humility. You have to be willing to believe, at least for the 15 minutes it takes to put together and send out your submission, that the stuff you make up and write down is so fascinating that thousands or tens of thousands of people would pay good money to read it. The Hollywood Bowl has a seating capacity of about 18,000, but even a modestly successful midlist novelist or someone who sells a story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reaches more people than that. Who the hell do we think we are?

At the same time, we have to embrace humility if we’re not going to drive ourselves nuts. Actors and salespeople are among the few who compete with writers in the “getting rejected” department–and even those professions don’t spend two years on a project, send it out, wait eighteen months, and receive in return a form letter saying “No thank you; good luck elsewhere.”

Impostor syndrome
So is it any wonder that writers are often susceptible to Impostor Syndrome? If you’re not familiar with Impostor Syndrome, you might be interested in the article “Impostor Syndrome” on this site, but short version is that it’s when you see your successes and you think they must be due to someone making a mistake. Any time you sell a story, get a bite from an agent, or receive a positive review, it seems like a fluke. Obviously these people don’t understand that I’m really a big faker, you might think, or if I wrote something good, it was just blind luck and will never happen again.

Many many writers I know struggle with impostor syndrome. From a certain perspective, it makes sense: if you spend years and years looking up to people who are getting regularly published in certain magazines or whose novels are making it into the hands of thousands of satisfied readers, and if during this time you get a constant barrage of polite but generally impersonal messages that say “No, this thing that you poured your heart and every ounce of skill you have into really isn’t any good,” then you’d have a pretty inflated view of yourself to not ask yourself if the sale you finally get isn’t some kind of anomaly. (No disrespect intended to those who, like me, lean more to the hubris side than the humility one.) Maybe the editor who bought your story was drunk when she read it. Maybe your new agent is confusing you with another writer who’s actually good.

Misdirected expectations
It can get even worse when you have a little success: maybe you sell a story or get an honorable mention in a major contest. What happens if the next story you send out fails miserably? It just reinforces the idea that the first success was a fluke–even though any decent statistician with access to writers’ track records would predict a few failures with a high degree of confidence, even for writers who overall became very successful.

It doesn’t help that we writers are not particularly good judges of our own work. (See “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing”). We may think a particular piece we’ve done is the best thing ever written, or may think it’s utter trash, and in either case we can be right on the nose, tragically wrong, or even both.

Thinking your way out
So how do you stop feeling like a faker? Well, there’s thought and there’s action.

In the thought department, we’re better off when we avoid telling ourselves things that are either false or questionable and instead stick to things we know are true. For instance, instead of thinking “I know this story is going to be rejected,” we can substitute the thought “This story might sell or it might not. If it doesn’t, I’ll send it somewhere else.” That process, called “cognitive restructuring” (or my preferred term, “idea repair”), may seem elementary, but it’s surprisingly effective, as research and clinical results have shown. If you’re interested in idea repair, which is useful for far more than just addressing Impostor Syndrome, you can find articles, books, and other resources on the topic here.

Where does confidence come from?
On the action side of things, one of the most productive things to do is more. Write more, send more out, and get more used to the rejections–and the acceptances. I was at my son’s high school yesterday for a parent presentation, and I was powerfully impressed to see what complete confidence and self-possession every one of his teachers showed when presenting to groups of parents. How can they be so confident? I asked myself.

The answer to where the confidence came from was quickly obvious to me: these are teachers who enjoy their jobs, and they stand up and talk like this for most of every workday. They have get in more public speaking in the typical week than many people will do in their lifetimes. Effective practice makes you better and better at what you’re doing, and it also quells concerns about whether you have any right to do it. I’ve written about 15,000 words of fiction in the past week. I know from critique responses (we sometimes get very rapid turnaround on critique in my writer’s group) that at least some of those words worked well for a good sampling of readers, but I have no way of knowing if the stories I’ve put together will sell or just become more rejection magnets. However, having written all that, and especially doing that and then sending the work out, I know that I’m a writer. Whether or not editors buy what I write is up to them and out of my direct control. All I can do is keep plugging away, always working on something new, concerning myself not with whether people accept what I’ve written but with how well I’m doing the job of churning out words worth reading.

The thing is, regardless of how successful your writing is now or ever, if you bust your hump putting out new works, and if you push the envelope to try to make yourself better at what you do, then you’re a writer–and you might as well be proud of it.

Photo by V’ron

I’ve been doing a series of interviews and posts on inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction, beginning to look at the circumstances of and solutions for various groups of people not being well-represented in fiction based on race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, gender, disability, neurology, social and economic class, and so on.  So far in the series, I’ve posted two interviews and one additional item:

7/27 – interview with Leah Bobet
7/29 – Where Are the Female Villains?
8/3 – interview with Vylar Kaftan

More interviews will appear here every Friday for some time to come.

For today’s post, I assembled responses from several Codex and SFWA members to a mini-interview I put together about concerns and obstacles to inclusivity in fiction. My main reason for doing this is that while there appears to be a lot of support for writing inclusively, there are sometimes real dangers involved, and these are sometimes dismissed as simple fear of making a mistake or looking bad. I think that there’s much more to it than that, and I was fortunate enough to get a variety of insightful and clear responses that explore the topic well.

Because there’s one respondent whom I didn’t explicitly make sure to get permission to mention by name as of publication time, I’ll use “Anonymous” for that author here.  You can find out a little about some of the authors who responded at the end of this post.

LUC: What concerns or anxieties do you have when it comes to writing characters who are very different from you, for instance in terms of gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, physical ability or disability, mental or neurological condition, background, or age?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: Getting it right! When I write about a character who’s substantially different from me I do as much research as I can in an effort to get not just the details but, as much as possible, the inner experience right. One of my most gratifying experiences was getting a shout-out from a Nigerian blogger for my story “Lagos,” which is set in near-future Nigeria and has a Yoruba woman as a main character — definitely a bit outside of my own experience, so I was very relieved to get such positive feedback!

ANON: From most important to least important my concerns are:

1. That I am fundamentally incapable of comprehending people from said group in a way profound enough to accurately represent them.
2. I may spread inaccurate information to uninformed readers who are also not of said group.
3. I may discourage a reader who is of said group from reading more of my work, or more of the genre, or prevent them from enjoying the story in question.
4. That by trying to acquire the necessary information to present said group accurately, that I will appear ignorant, racist, insensitive, or otherwise bigoted to the person(s) of that group whom I’m interviewing (and thereby damage the personal or professional relationship I had with said person).
5. That even if I accurately represent said group to some degree, that an individual from that group will have had a different experience and publicly decry my story telling abilities in a way that will impact the success of the story in question.
6. That the actual content of the story may be overlooked or under-appreciated because some of my characters are of a particular group and some/most readers are prejudiced against said group.
7. That an error or perceived error may damage my writing career.

STEVE BEIN: Being PC doesn’t concern me.  Being authentic does.  Politically speaking, I’m not overly concerned with this sort of thing, but I’ve taught a lot of ethics courses in my time (I’m a philosophy professor by day), and I always include feminism and critical race theory in those courses.  The disability rights movement often comes up in my classes too, as does social and economic injustice.  Coupled with all of that, I’ve done some academic writing on diversity, so I feel I’ve indirectly put a lot of thought into how to approach characters who are very different from me.  That said, the primary problem for the writer is authenticity.  No caricatures or stereotypes allowed; the character has to be a lot better than that.  I feel I have to do a lot of research and pay very close attention to crafting the language.

ELIZABETH MOON: Very little. There’s a basic concern for getting things right, of course. But there’s no more concern or anxiety for “different from myself” on the axes you mentioned than I would have for accurate portrayal of a farmer, an auto mechanic, an investment banker, a soldier…the character has to feel real to the reader, someone who could emerge from the culture as shown, and become the person he or she is. One advantage of being older and from my background is a lot of experience with people very different from myself. So it comes naturally to include a variety (though certainly not every possible variation of every category–that would be a catalog, not a story.) There are cultures and occupations and backgrounds I’m more familiar with; the ones I’m less familiar with do require more research and care if they’re in the story. The advantage of writing SF and fantasy is that I’m not bound by existing cultures or existing situations and attitudes, and can move backward, forward, or sideways to change parameters and play the what-if game with more than technology. I don’t worry about “balance” according to any formula in any given book, because the books and stories are different, and overall I know there’s variety.

Presenting unexpected (to some readers) diversity often means they miss it entirely (not something I expected, starting out) and read characters as whatever that reader’s default is. I should have expected that; I did the same myself as a kid, automatically placing myself, a girl, in the heads of characters who were clearly boys or men. They did the interesting stuff. Since I myself could skate past the very clear signals that a book’s main character was male…I have quit worrying that my clear signals about skin color, age, background, etc. are not getting through to all readers. There’s only so much you can do without messing up the story.

M. BENNARDO: My feeling is that any fears or concerns I may have about writing characters who are different from me are really fears about appearing ignorant, or fears of being accused of ignorance. To a certain extent, those concerns are productive — I’ve certainly done a little extra research now and then in the hopes of looking less foolish.

But ultimately I have to accept that no amount of research will ever be “enough” and that I will always be exposing some amount of ignorance to people who are better informed than I am. (In this case, better informed about some set of life circumstances that I do not share.) My responsibility is to write the most compelling story I can today, and then to write an even better story tomorrow. Part of this is being informed and thoughtful, but another part of it is also taking the plunge and risking looking like a fool.

If I do get called a fool because of some act of ignorance or carelessness on my part — well, that just means I’ve become part of a conversation where I am not the smartest or most informed person around. I’d really be missing out if I let my fears get in the way of that.

LUC: Have these issues ever prevented you from writing something you otherwise would have pursued?

MATTHEW JOHNSON: No, but there have definitely been cases where I did a lot of research to make sure I got everything right. My story “The Face of the Waters” was probably the most nerve-wracking, but I can’t say why without spoiling the twist…

ANON: Yes, on more than one occasion.

STEVE BEIN: Not yet.

ELIZABETH MOON: No. But that’s largely because I wanted to write SF and fantasy, where I wasn’t constrained by current events. I wanted to change parameters and see what happened. Also, even when I realized some readers misread a character to their default…that’s their choice, or their problem, or their limitation. I give them the clues; they can use them or not. I have no control over that, any more than the authors of the books I read as a child could have stopped me from imagining myself into the male characters. There are, inevitably, some categories I’ve used less or even skipped–some I don’t know much about, others that–despite knowing something about–just aren’t that interesting to me in the story sense. Putting someone in just to be the poster child for his/her category, so I can claim more inclusivity is….in my view…a big fat fraud. The diversity that’s in the work is organic to the work. I didn’t write a book about an old woman to show off–but because that old woman, Ofelia, came into my head and pestered me. I didn’t write a book about an autistic man just because we have an autistic son, but because Lou showed up and said “I want to ask the questions.” (Having an autistic son, and having met other autists and parents along the way, certainly gave me plenty of background material–but the character snagged me.) The exploited children with various disabilities in the story “Combat Shopping” were there because the situation demanded them (and because Andi got into my head and said “Write me!”)

About Some of the Authors Above

Photo by  tomswift46

Attending Readercon recently, I was struck by discussions I heard and took part in that brought up the problem of inclusivity and exclusivity in fiction: that is, what kinds of characters are conspicuously not present or very often stereotyped. This applies to race, but also to a lot of other categories: sexual preference, gender and gender identity, age, disability, mental health, social and economic class, and others.

The question I’m left with as a writer is this: what am I not doing and not seeing that’s contributing to the problem, and what can I do and understand that will contribute to making things better? So I’m doing a series of interviews with writers I admire who have things to say on the subject, starting with this one with Leah Bobet, whose novel Above (Arthur A. Levine, just out in April) tackles physical differences and marginalization in a novel and compelling way. Publisher’s Weekly gave it starred review: “Bobet effortlessly blends reality and fantasy, her characters are both gifted and broken—hers is a world that is simultaneously fantastic and painfully real.”

LUC: A lot of your fiction deals with characters that aren’t common in the books and stories we often see. From your point of view, is this tendency of most commercial fiction to prefer white, fairly young, straight, “non-ethnic”, monotheistic, neurotypical, non-disabled, and otherwise “normal” (perhaps I should say “as-though-normal”) characters a problem, or are you just taking a different path? If it’s a problem, what’s wrong with it?

LEAH: Hah – you’re asking me if this is a creative decision or a political one!  Well-played.  And, well, it’s both.  They’re inextricable.

I feel that it’s definitely a problem, yes – and it’s because of that word “normal”.  We’re none of us normal, and we’re all normal, and that’s not just the thing your parents tell you to make you feel better when some bigger kid pushed you around for whatever invented reason.  Calling one (fairly narrow!) kind of person “normal” makes people expect that their stories are the most important, and ultimately, that anyone who falls outside those lines doesn’t really have stories.  And they do.  We do.  You do.

Not only does that rob everyone of a whole lot of interesting stories, but it slowly and concretely gives us the idea that those people who aren’t “normal” don’t really matter.  They don’t have stories, so they don’t do interesting things; fight fights; reconcile; cry; learn; fail.  They don’t exist.

And telling most of the people in your society that they subtly don’t exist?  Just, well.  Seems like a bad idea to me.

LUC: So what happens when traditionally disregarded groups of people do make it into our novels and stories, especially as central characters? What kinds of impact can or do we have on readers when we write more inclusively?

LEAH: Well…just like with any work of fiction, a few things can happen.  It depends on who’s writing the work – are they in the group, or out of it? – and who’s reading it, and how well the portrayal is done.

The portrayal can be done sloppily or on the basis of the kind of harmful stereotypes that most people have about someone else without even realizing it, and then people are hurt and angry, and there are negative feelings all around.  Or, when it’s done thoughtfully, it can still sink like a stone: Books or stories fail to catch on all the time, for reasons I’m sure most of publishing would pay in body parts to figure out.  Or, well, there can be a benefit to readers, or to the community overall.

I think it’s probably hard to say where those social benefits begin and end.  Readers are people, and each person has a different and individual relationship with the various labels and roles that make up their identity (and that’s the first trap of all: thinking that just because someone is a member of a minority group, that that identity is their identity, or that all members of a given group have the same relationship to that part of their lives.  It’s not, and they don’t.)  So one reader might see themself in a character and feel like their existence, their stories, are being acknowledged by the larger community.  Another might start thinking about how their neighbour sees the world, and even if that’s not how their neighbour sees the world at all, learning to be considerate is, I think, a real plus.  Another might say, “That’s not what being X is like,” and then be clearer on what, for them, being X is actually like and why someone else might see it that way, whether that someone else is a member of the group or not.

Someone else might realize, in the back of their head, that there are more stories and ways of living out there than their own, and develop further the kind of open-mindedness that makes you not automatically reject someone living differently than yourself.

This happens.  This works.  Once upon a time when I was eleven years old, and didn’t even have much of a concept of gay people (yeah, it was a pretty isolated and homogenous suburb, and it was the early nineties.  I know.) I read Poppy Z. Brite’s Drawing Blood. Besides all the vampire sex and killing, what I took from that was that gay people are just people with relationships and problems and to do lists and lives to run and stories.  And although here and there I’ve struggled with the kind of ingrained prejudices you get when you grow up in a largely racially homogenous, economically homogenous, religiously homogenous isolated suburb, that has never been one of them.  Right story, right time, right reader.

So I guess what I’ve been groping towards here is that portraying characters and people who aren’t in that narrow band of traditional North American “normal” can, at its best, make people different from a reader not other.  It can make a reader go, “Oh, right, that person is still a person,” instead of seeing a role, a stereotype, an other.  It can make all the readers out there who don’t fit in that narrow slice of the population whose stories are always told – being, most of the population of North America right now – feel like yes, everyone else sees them; they are acknowledged as part of the community too.  That they have a voice and a place, and space to be more than the stereotypes that are frequently expected.  It gets writers who aren’t part of that narrow slice of the population out there, heard, and paid, which is really important, because having homogenous professions in a heterogenous community can be really toxic when it comes to things like public policy, and who needs what, and how it needs to be done in the everyday world.

And then?  Maybe we all treat each other better.

I’ll have more questions for Leah in a follow-up interview down the road.

In two recent posts (“Why Amazon Studios Will Succeed, Part 1: Crowdsourced Projects” and “Why Amazon Studios Will Succeed, Part 2: Customers and Distribution“), I’ve talked about the advantages Amazon has in becoming a producer and distributor of movies and series. That’s clearly great for Amazon, and it seems likely it will be great for audiences, too.

How will Amazon Studios affect writers?
What I don’t know at this point is how writers will be affected. My guess is that it will be much like the Kindle Store: some writers will come up with products that catch on and will do spectacularly well while most won’t see any significant success at all. Disappointing as that is for the majority of would-be screenwriters, that’s as it should be: there’s only so much media the world needs, and not everyone who wants to be a screenwriter can be: those who are most persistent, passionate, and hardworking and who make the most effective project choices will succeed.

For better or for worse, I suspect Amazon Studios will begin to suck some of the profit out of the traditional movie and series production channels, which is likely to limit opportunities for writers there. The game changes, and players just shift around. Overall, our hunger for new content is likely to be about the same either way, and I don’t see Amazon changing the total number of successful screenwriters very much, unless they’re successful in getting a lot of niches interested in a lot of niche projects, in which case there will be more jobs for less pay.

However, there’s an argument–one I’m inclined toward, but not ready to back wholeheartedly–that an Amazon Studios system will be better for writers than the traditional routes to screenwriting success. Why? Because instead of a small number of gatekeepers who are sometimes difficult to access, gatekeeping duties instead get assigned to the Crowd. This means that if a story can capture people’s interest, it’s likely to succeed–the successes would be less subject to individual whim, preference, and assumptions of what does and doesn’t work.

On the other hand, a reasonable person could say that this is likely to result in more pandering to the masses, more success of whatever stories take the cheapest and easiest routes to popularity. If a reasonable person were to say this to me, however, I would laugh in that reasonable person’s face. After all, look at movies and television programs now: for every truly innovative or meaningful project, there are a hundred others that are cheap, derivative, or even detrimental to our experience as human beings. It seems likely to me that quirky, meaningful projects that really do have meaning for a lot of people are more likely to succeed in a crowdkeeping environment than in a gatekeeping environment, because the best thing gatekeepers have to go on is past successes, whereas a crowd can give a reliable response directly from the gut.

Then again, the Kindle Store successes to date have tended to be the same mysteries, thrillers, and paranormal romances that crowd the bestseller racks everywhere, so what do I know? Maybe I shouldn’t be so optimistic on that count. In my defense, I did say I’m not ready to fully back that view at this point.

My experience with Amazon Studios
In my case, I have a feature-length film screenplay called Down based on my Writers of the Future winning novelette “Bottomless.”  The script has been out to quite a number of agents, managers, production companies, and contests, but apart from a few mildly encouraging comments has gotten nowhere. For a number of months, it has basically been doing little else than taking up space on my hard drive.

This is a story that I love. It takes place in a vast bottomless pit, lit by a sun-like thread down the center, and populated by villages built on ledges all around its walls. The cardinal rule in this world is that you don’t throw anything into the Pit, because if you do, it’s likely to kill someone somewhere below you. It’s basically an entire world built on fear of heights and vertigo. I really enjoyed writing the story and enjoyed even more expanding it into a feature-length film, in which a young man obsessed with the secrets of the Pit (Why is it there? Is there a bottom or not?) is exiled from his village and journeys deep, deep into Pit in a search for answers–and when he finds them, he discovers a danger much worse than anything he had imagined.

I’ve uploaded Down to Amazon Studios: you can see it here, and even download the screenplay if you like. It has done well so far in Premise Wars, a game anyone can play on Amazon Studios’ home page (just go to http://studios.amazon.com and scroll down to the gold Premise Wars heading), where you’re presented with two brief descriptions of movie projects and you select the one you like better. The top 10 Premise Wars projects as of this writing have won in the range of 53%-71% of the time, while Down currently has won 77% of its Premise Wars battles–but Amazon determines the Premise Wars winners on a secret formula that, as they describe it, makes complex adjustments based on which other premises any given premise has bested. This more or less explains how premises that have lost more than they have won in Premise Wars are still making the leaderboard (though not, at the moment, in the top 10 spots), even though it’s a little hard to believe that they’re doing so much better with an adjusted score than they do with their raw percentage. However, my impression is that being in the top 10 on the leaderboard doesn’t necessarily count for much anyway: it seems to matter much more if people review your script positively or decide to make a trailer for it. We’ll have to see if either of those things develop down the line.

My next post in this series will cover some of the dangers and limitations writers face at Amazon Studios.

Movie shoot photo by jonas maaloe
Down image by writer Elise Tobler.

This post originally appeared as part of my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” on the now-dormant online magazine Futurismic.

Do writers who use critique groups do better than writers who don’t? Do writers need mentors? What differentiates a bad writer from a good writer, and a good writer from a great writer? Does it always take time to develop writing skills, or do some people just have them right off?

All complicated questions. Here are some answers.

Born with it?
The first thing I have to tell you may not go down easily if you haven’t come across it already. This is it: you were born with pretty much no talent for writing. The same with me. Also Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and the screenwriter forDude, Where’s My Car? … well, let’s not look too closely at that last example. The point is, virtually all writing skill islearned.

I can understand if this isn’t easily believable. The myth of talent is rampant in our culture: the standard idea is that any time we see someone who can do something really well, it’s because that person is just naturally gifted in that area. It’s an understandable mistake to assume that, but other than in very limited ways, like physical build for some kinds of athletes and range of intelligence for many fields, genetics does not determine what a person will be good at.

What does? Practice: lots and lots of focused practice, with lots and lots of feedback. Toddler Mozart practicing music for hours and hours every day under the watchful eye of one of the most celebrated music teachers in Europe at the time–his father. Tiger Woods got long, intensive golf lessons at a very young age from a highly accomplished golf teacher–hisfather. And so on.

Practice and feedback
I won’t work too hard to convince you of the importance of quality practice here, but if you’re interested (or absolutely disbelieving), try my post Do You Have Enough Talent to Be Great at It?, or read Geoff Colvin’s extensively-researched book Talent Is Overrated or the first part of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Skill and artistry come from deliberate practice, which is to say practice that is undertaken in a smart way, that presents challenges, and that gets constant feedback.

Getting deliberate practice means pushing ourselves. Just showing up and putting in minimal effort doesn’t get us anywhere, which is why a mediocre accountant can keep books for 40 years and retire not much less mediocre than he started, if he doesn’t actively try to get better with challenges and feedback.

The feedback part is especially crucial. The process of improving our skills in a particular area is essentially one of try-get feedback-incorporate feedback-try again. If we don’t get feedback, then we have no useful information to apply to our next try, and we’re not likely to get any better.

Ways to get feedback
Fortunately, sources of feedback for writers abound. First of all, our own reactions to our writing are feedback, and while that feedback isn’t unbiased, it can be useful. For instance, if I write a story and am excited by what I’m writing–whether it’s coming out easily or has to be dragged word by word from the gaping pit of Hell–then that bodes much better for the work than if I have no strong reaction to it, or only have vague hopes that it might be good enough.

But feedback from others is even more valuable, because other people will react more to the story on paper than to the story the writer is imagining. Every story critique we receive, every family member who sits through reading something we’ve written or starts to read it and then makes an excuse to put it aside, every rejection letter, every personal note scrawled in the margin of a rejection letter, every acceptance and rewrite request, every review, every letter from a reader who loves or hates the story helps tell us how we’ve affected one particular reader–and in the case of editors and agents, that reader’s professional opinion of the impact of our writing will likely have on other readers.

The problems are that every reader is different and that some of the feedback we get isn’t even a faithful representation of what the reader really thinks. A writer I know, for instance, went through a critique group where she was energetically encouraged to submit a book–a book that it later turned out most of the encouraging parties hadn’t even read. Then she switched into a critique group where one particular member seemed to be certain that she had no idea how to tell a decent story, on the theory that his opinion alone was valid to tell what was and wasn’t decent writing. (More on these particular incidents can be found in my article Telling Bad Advice from Good Advice.)

Still, it’s essential to get some kind of outside feedback on writing, even if that feedback is only rejection slips, acceptances, or sales figures–with more feedback being better as long as the writer can keep up with it. But it’s also essential to realize that no single person can give complete feedback on any piece of writing. A person can only pass along an individual reaction and, if that person is an experienced professional in writing or publishing, conclusions based on professional experience–which can also easily be off. For instance, J.K. Rowling’s agent had to spend a full year finding a publisher for the first Harry Potter book because publisher after publisher kept rejecting it: their experience told them it was too long to sell. They were right, in a way: the recent successes for that age group were much shorter books (although it’s hard to say if that was in part self-fulfilling, that no one would publish longer books due to the conventional wisdom that longer books wouldn’t sell). Like everyone, these publishers have individual tastes and limits to their knowledge. No one opinion can be comprehensive.

Yoda, Gandalf, Donald Trump
Which brings us to mentors, who can be incredibly helpful or the worst possible influence. After all, if a mentor has very high credibility then we tend to put a lot of weight on whatever they say, whether they’re saying that your story is great and should sell to a major market (Orson Scott Card, speaking to a writing student whose story sold immediately on being sent out) or San Francisco Examiner editor who reputedly rejected Rudyard Kipling with the words “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” If the mentor has low credibility, then we tend to disregard what they’re saying unless it completely agrees with our own already-formed opinions, but a high-credibility mentor can create beliefs about our work that may or may not be any help to us going forward. One writer I knew wrote a piece of flash fiction that was praised highly by a seasoned pro. The writer, preoccupied with the high praise, rewrote the piece over and over for years as it grew into first a short story, then a novelette, and then a novella. To the best of my knowledge, he never did sell the final version.

The worst mentors, though, are those with high credibility but little real experience. For instance, while some college writing professors are excellent mentors, others may have no successful experience of their own in the kinds of writing that interest you. For instance, if you want to write historical romance novels, what’s the value of feedback from a professor who doesn’t read romance and whose own publications are limited to intensely experimental fiction published in tiny literary magazines? We won’t even talk about a writing teacher whose work hasn’t been published anywhere significant at all.

But if we imagine for a minute a mentor who has good credibility and whose comments tend to offer a lot of insight that the student doesn’t already have, it quickly becomes apparent how useful one can be. Someone who really knows what they’re talking about can set the record straight very quickly and accelerate the process of becoming a better writer. At “Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp” in 2001, Orson Scott Card talked to me and the 19 other participants about actively coming up with ideas instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, and then had us use different strategies to come up with those ideas until we saw that we could conjure them on demand. At the Writers of the Future Workshop in 2003, Tim Powers talked about the importance of using the senses in writing (for example, he recommended knowing where the light was coming from in every scene), and that good advice has stuck with me, too.

Fortunately, mentors also come in convenient book and blog form. Books like Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel, Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint, or Stephen King’s On Writing (other suggestions in comments are welcome) deliver an enormous amount of useful information that can prevent having to learn their lessons through years of trial and error, or worse, never learning those lessons at all. But this isn’t feedback per se, just ideas that we can incorporate into our own attempts. Feedback from ourselves and others will eventually tell us how successful those ideas were.

The real magic starts happening once we write and send our work out into the world–to a friend, to a critique group, to a magazine, to an agent, to a mentor, or anywhere where it can be praised, scoffed at, devoured, or ignored. Card theorized that writers have a million words of garbage to write before their writing gets consistently good, and this might be a pretty good rule of thumb–something along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion (which he does a good job of backing up with evidence) that regardless of the skill, it takes about 10,000 hours to become really world class (not just professionally competent) at something. In both cases, the pages and hours are practice, and practice is more effective when it’s more challenging and when it includes more and better feedback–so that the length of time and the amount of work between where we are now and where we want to be as writers becomes shorter the better the quality of our practice and feedback.

Photo by /Sizemore/